Hunter Biden was working with a Chinese oil company in Kazakhstan that is now under US sanctions and a former Kazakh prime minister now accused of treason to broker a lucrative pipeline deal, DailyMail.com can reveal.

Emails obtained by DailyMail.com show the president's son teamed up with the former Kazakh prime minister Karim Massimov, now facing charges of high treason, to try to pull off a $120million pipeline deal after similar ventures had faced opposition from Western energy firms.

There is no indication Massimov's charges are connected to Hunter's pipeline deal. 

One of Hunter's proposed Kazakh energy deals involved the State China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC), one of China's biggest oil firms.

The company was sanctioned in 2020 and again last year for its alleged involvement in the Chinese government's 'coercive behavior in the South China Sea'.

Emails from Hunter's abandoned laptop show he traveled to Beijing and Kazakhstan to forge a blockbuster oil deal between the two countries in 2014 and 2015.

Hunter brokered the deal on behalf of a Ukrainian gas firm Burisma on whose board he sat.

His role at the firm, owned by an oligarch accused of corruption, is already deeply controversial.

But the involvement of Hunter's Chinese business partners with Burisma adds a new and troubling dimension to his dealings in Eastern Europe – indicating that he was working on a deal that could indirectly further the energy interests of the Chinese government while hoping to collect millions of dollars for himself.